


Do No Harm

by regenderate



Series: Fanzine Prompts [1]
Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-17
Updated: 2019-04-17
Packaged: 2020-01-15 10:43:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18497302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/regenderate/pseuds/regenderate
Summary: She chose it with purpose, chose it with care. It translates into any language in the universe: twisted through the TARDIS translation matrix, it becomes the word for healer, helper, sometimes friend. It was aspirational at the time. She wanted to be a healer. She still does, even though it’s gotten harder and harder the longer she’s been traveling.--Response to this week's prompt from the thirteen fanzine. An exploration of the Doctor's name and what it means to her.





	Do No Harm

**Author's Note:**

> prompt: "I have a duty of care." https://thirteenfanzine.tumblr.com/post/184228715289/attention-fandom-writers-and-artists
> 
> and keep your eye out for the fanzine itself! :-D
> 
> ALSO: I thought about what pronouns to use for the Doctor in this, and I decided to use she/her even when talking about past iterations because I don’t think pronouns matter to her, and I don’t think that her first language would have gendered pronouns anyway, and therefore I think she would refer to herself by whatever pronouns she has handy.

She chose her name, years ago.

_ Doctor _ .

She chose it with purpose, chose it with care. It translates into any language in the universe: twisted through the TARDIS translation matrix, it becomes the word for  _ healer _ ,  _ helper _ , sometimes  _ friend _ . It was aspirational at the time. She wanted to be a healer. She still does, even though it’s gotten harder and harder the longer she’s been traveling.

Still.

She’s only given up on it once.

And she’s determined not to get to that point again. 

She just has to keep moving forward.

She lands on a train, makes new friends, helps the first people she finds.

Someone dies.

It’s not her fault (it’s all her fault).

Either way she has failed.

She travels with her new friends, minus one-- even though she failed them, they trust her. Maybe it's the name.  _ Doctor.  _ Someone you should trust, no matter what.

They hang on to her every word. They stare out at planets they were never meant to see. And they never once question her decisions.

Not to her face, anyway. 

She knows how she looks to them, some sort of enigmatic god, full of whimsy, larking about in a spaceship. She knows how she looks, and deep down inside, she likes it. She can enforce her shiny new morals, pretend nothing's ever gone wrong, even though everything, always, has gone so very wrong. 

She knows her view of morality is unrealistic, these days. She’s seen enough civilizations, talked to enough people, to know that: it's too black and white, and nothing in the universe is black and white. But it's this or making it up on the fly, and-- she doesn't trust herself to make it up anymore. It’s much simpler to have a rigid moral code.

Yaz asks her, one night after they've just barely managed to save a town in ancient China, where her rules come from. 

“Human doctors have a whole ethics board,” she explains. “Is it like that for you?”

“Used to be,” the Doctor says. “Not anymore. I make my own rules, these days.”

Yaz takes a moment to digest this. 

“Seems dangerous,” she says. 

“Lucky for me,” the Doctor says, “I've never minded danger.”

Sometimes she thinks maybe she shouldn't be making her own rules, even when she does err on the side of too black and white. Maybe it's too dangerous, or just dangerous for everyone but her. But then again, human doctors can't always heal everyone either. Sometimes they fail. No matter who's writing the rules. 

Not long after that, she lets her age slip. She doesn’t think anything of it in the moment, but later, Graham asks her how she's kept going for so long. Why she keeps helping. 

“No choice,” she tells him. “Can't just waste away, can I? Not that I haven't tried.”

“You could always die,” Graham says. “Even a space alien like you has to be able to die eventually.”

“Suppose I'm scared,” the Doctor says. 

“Of dying?” Graham asks. 

“Not really,” she says. “It’s more like I’m scared of not being around anymore. What happens to the universe after that. I have to stay alive. For all the people I can help.” Even if sometimes she hurts them instead. Even if sometimes they listen to her, they follow her rules, they trust her too much, and she knows she will inevitably let them down.

There’s a part of her, inside, that feels cracked, fragile, like maybe it’ll fall apart at any minute. She doesn’t know what to do about it. She just has to keep going.

She loves Ryan and Graham and Yaz. They're good for her. But a part of her misses her old friends, Rose and Martha and Donna, Amy and Rory and Clara and Bill. The ones who stood up to her, called her out, told her when they thought she was wrong. She often remembers the way Martha told her she had to earn the title of Doctor, the way she had expected what had once been an aspiration to be a reality. Her new friends take that title for granted, she thinks. They’re so awed by her that they can’t see her flaws. 

She is so, so afraid of the first time they see her angry. 

But she can’t say that, she can’t do that, she can’t  _ get  _ angry, she has to stay in control of herself, so she just helps people, when she can, and tries to reduce the harm she causes, when she can. That’s the first rule of being a human doctor, after all.  _ First, do no harm. _ And the Doctor dreams of a world in which she has done no harm. (She didn’t, always-- back at the beginning when she had lived in that world she hadn’t known how good she’d had it. When she had been hoping to be a doctor, the Doctor, she hadn’t realized that she was as close to being a healer as she would ever get. But maybe that was what so many years did to a person.)

Days, weeks, months pass. Her facade drops, little by little, until the others almost know her.

“Why do you call yourself the Doctor?” Ryan asks eventually. “Can’t be your real name, can it?”

“Real enough,” the Doctor replies. “Suppose I did come up with it myself, though.”

“Why?” Ryan asks again.

“Got a duty of care,” the Doctor says. “Got to use my power responsibly, haven’t I?”

“Suppose so,” Ryan says. “Still. Doesn’t it get weird sometimes?”

“I can always make up a name,” the Doctor says. “You know. A one-time thing. Like John or Jane or something. I don’t think having a name from any one culture would help me much, anyway, all the traveling I do. Much better to have something that translates.”

“Never trusted doctors,” Ryan says. “Had a lot of bad experiences as a kid. You’re all right, though.”

“Thanks,” the Doctor replies.

She doesn’t mention the people she’s let down.

She is the Doctor. It’s aspirational, it’s reality, it’s unrealistic. It’s been two thousand years, and she’s still afraid of what happens when she’s not there anymore. And she hopes, desperately, with each new body, that this will be the one to do no harm.

**Author's Note:**

> I FINISHED THIS AT LIKE 1 AM WHILE HALF ASLEEP AFTER A FULL DAY OF PLAYING AT A SUMMER CAMP AND THEN GOING TO REHEARSAL AND THEN HAVING A MINOR BREAKDOWN WHILE ALSO TRYING TO COMPLETE AN ASSIGNMENT DUE AT MIDNIGHT BUT I TRIED VERY HARD TO BE COHERENT


End file.
